Get Your Challenging Hybrid Collaboration Sessions Off On The Right Foot
Learn two ways to prepare for successful hybrid collaboration
As some companies are pushing for all their employees to return to the office full-time, others are happy to continue the hybrid approach to work contributing to worker satisfaction and resulting in higher employee retention. In house facilitators have found themselves having to adjust as well to conducting hybrid collaboration sessions. Facilitating seamless strategy sessions and other collaborations certainly is a challenge in itself but when you add the hybrid element into the mix it becomes more of a feat. If you ask me, it’s best to work together either fully in-person or fully remote. However, if that is out of the question then here are couple of points to consider as you plan.
Give deep consideration to the room set up. A challenge that can exist in hybrid collaboration is that the remote participants can begin to feel left out since they are not in the actual collaboration space itself. It’s your job as the facilitator to organize the room in a way that all participants whether in-person or remote feel connected and included as if they are all in the same room.
Have multiple cameras step up strategically to give remote participants a 360-degree view of the room. If available, adding a center-of-the-table camera can help to eliminate the bowling alley view that happens when one camera is placed at the head of the room. An awesome way for each in-room participant to be present in the virtual room is to use AI capture software either in the camera or meeting room platform. As long as everyone is visible to the camera the software can identify each in-room participant and place them in their own squares in the virtual room.
Of course, the virtual participants must have a presence in the physical room as well since it’s easy for them to get lost or forgotten in the mass of small squares on a laptop screen. Some make sure to have large screens set up about the room not just for the presentation to be seen by all but also for the virtual attendees to be seen as well. Other facilitators make sure to have one laptop per virtual attendee placed on the table to help give the feel that they are in-person.
Make sure that all ideas are accessible to all participants. How do the ideas of in-room attendees merge with those of virtual participants? Here’s where having a great moderator can help. The moderator can make sure that the in-room ideas appear on virtual sticky notes and vice versa. He or she can make the results of voting apparent to all as well. Using a virtual whiteboard like Miro with the capacity to turn handwritten notes into virtual notes can be a time saver for sure.
About 30% of organizations are using touchscreen devices now, while another 25% plan to adopt them in the next year. Organizations are outfitting about 60% of their meeting rooms with touchscreen devices. If this is the case at your company, I highly recommend relying on this technology to keep a harmonious record of ideas for all to see.
You can never plan too much when it comes to hybrid meetings. As you do keep in mind that it will lead to a happy collaboration!